Hello everyone, I have been searching for an answer to my question for a while now and I thought the best thing to do was to ask it here as where better to get information than the source! Anyway, my husband and I are planning to move to Crete from the US for a job opportunity for him. My question is, I work from home online and need unrestricted and reliable internet access. Is this going to be an issue? If it is, what solutions do you suggest? Thanks in advance!

I pay slightly more than that, about €40/month for VDSL (not ADSL)which, currently is available only with OTE/cosmote (national telecoms company) which gives me a speed of 27Mbps - sold as a nominal 30Mbps. For €50/month you can get up to 50Mbps but that's more than I need.As peebee says, first you need to ensure you have a landline and they're in short supply or not available at all in some places. In places with limited availability you'd need to ensure that wherever you buy or rent a house has an existing line that you can take over.

filippos wrote:I pay slightly more than that, about €40/month for VDSL (not ADSL)which, currently is available only with OTE/cosmote (national telecoms company)...

...and it is NOT available in all areas. For example, I live around 300 m from an exchange and, like peebee, get about 12 Mbps on a 24 Mbps ADSL service. VDSL is NOT available on that particular exchange. You need to choose where you live very, very carefully and do a lot of research before you rent/buy. As Filippos says, not being able to get a land-line at all is still quite common in some areas and in others the quality of the ancient lines is so poor they won't support broadband at all. There is absolutely no chance at all of getting a problem like no landlines available or poor lines rectified. I would guess, but don't know for sure, that an apartment in a big city like Heraklion or Chania might maximise your chances.

As far as I know there is no uncapped contract on mobile broadband nor on satellite broadband so these are not an option for heavy users. If you pick the wrong place there are no alternative solutions.

There is now an uncapped version of Tooway satellite system available and the supplier is Europasat from the UK.If you need any info then you can contact me and I will give you the details. Current monthly rate is €99.95 per month. Same speed as other current Tooway systems and it is not throttled.

That's odd? According to the Europasat web site the maximum package for Greece is capped at 100 Gb although, like other Tooway packages for Greece, it unlimited at night, i.e. 12pm to 6 am. I don't know if that is a typo by Europasat but if they really mean 100 Gb then that is only around 12 GB which is not very much for a month. I suspect it is just a mistake because their packages are similar to Tooway and they quote in GB.

Ok, sounds great to me. So there are no sites that are blocked or anything? Like I said, as a freelance I visit a lot of sites every day, so I need them to be unrestricted or know a way around it. Thanks!

AbbyJ504 wrote:...So there are no sites that are blocked or anything? ...

Yes, there are many sites that are blocked. For example, sites like BBC TV, ITV etc in the UK buy the right to broadcast programmes in the UK so they will not allow people outside the UK to access that material. I am sure there are US sites that do the same thing for the same reason. There are ways round it, e.g. using a VPN, but they are not always successful. Companies that want to restrict access, for whatever reason, try to find the web addresses used by companies providing VPN services and block those as well as foreign addresses. In the case of smart phones and tablets it is also possible that they will use the GPS location service on the device to determine location so using a VPN won't help. If you block GPS access then the App won't work. All this is nothing to do with the Greek company acting as ISP. I am not aware of anything being blocked at this end.

OK, so using a VPN for the blocked sites may help, though it may not be 100% successful. I understand. Any suggestions on VPNs that work the best? I found this when researching and didn't know if anyone had any experience with the ones listed in this post: https://securethoughts.com/vpn-review/. Thanks for all your help.

It depends where you want to spoof your address to. Most people on this forum probably want to make it look like they are in the UK so they will tend to recommend VPN services that offer that. Based on your first post in this thread you probably want to appear to be in the USA. In that case the ones in the review article might be better although I have no experience of them.

I've used for many years now, both in Crete and elsewhere, https://www.privateinternetaccess.com. For the single subscription, you can select from several worldwide locations, including 10 in the USA (Seattle, San Francisco, New York for example). I mainly use the 2 UK locations (London, Southampton) but have used the American servers from time to time without any problem.

It's not expensive, has good uptime and doesn't downgrade the underlying connection speed too much unlike some other VPNs I've tried.

You can try it out with a month's subscription and then sign up for longer if you like it.